Cut, Copy and Paste
by mattmetzger
Summary: Jack returns to Earth long after all the old team are dead and gone. So how it is possible to be looking Suzie Costello in the eye? Suddenly on a quest to find people long dead, Jack finds himself in the middle of events that will destroy the future.
1. Chapter 1

**Notes: A shiny new chaptered story for you all. Due to having a busier life now, I won't be able to update so often, but I like this story so I started it anyway. I hope not to be too ridiculous with updates. Anyway: this is a story that spins off after the Children of Earth finale. For the purposes of this story, please ignore any potential future seasons of Torchwood (should they happen).**

**Cut, Copy and Paste**

**Chapter One**

Twenty-five-ten was a prosperous year for Britain. Business, both human and alien, was going swimmingly. Alien tourism was just beginning to take off, and Britain was its homing centre - mostly because, as Britain was the first of the Earth nations to make confirmed contact with other species, most aliens operated under the false assumption that Britain ruled Earth.

So Jack found that the cheapest shuttles were bound for London itself, and the Torchwood-run customs systems above what had once been Gatwick airport. The trip itself was more painful that he could have prepared himself for - for the first time in nearly five hundred years, he was looking at dark-haired people, and though once he would have called the resemblence poor and inaccurate, now it was like seeing his long-dead team all over again.

Earth had changed little in his five hundred year absence. The cities were shinier, the people just as hurried about their daily business, there were less children, and the first alien tourists and immigrants were openly visible on the streets. But it was still _Earth_, and human nature hadn't really changed much.

Jack had to admit that he'd missed Earth. It was a charming planet, really – rustic, in a way – and he'd missed that, and the strange differences inside the same species. People were weird: there was no way around that.

He had used the invitation of an old friend as an excuse to return. He would simply neglect to leave again once his assistance with the paper was over.

The paper was about historical flux, or something of that ilk, and Jack's friend (rather correctly) assumed that an immortal man would have an exceptional viewpoint on it. It would, she proclaimed, help greatly with the 'overall contextual impact' (whatever that meant) and Jack had hummed in all the right places and tried to ignore the pang in his chest whenever she enthused like that. Because, really, she sounded like a strange cross between Suzie and Toshiko whenever they had gotten excited about a technological development or find.

Five hundred years and he still missed them every day.

It was pathetic, really. Ordinary people lost their loved ones all the time and recovered. They didn't pine for the rest of their lives – and their lives were nowhere close to five hundred years. Why was it taking him so _long _to recover?

Sometimes, Jack resented them for dying. He would hate them for leaving him, and then hate himself for thinking something so completely unfair and irrational. They'd not chosen to leave him – hell, in Gwen's case, he had left her. She had never walked away from him. He hadn't even been there when she'd died – which, by now, she would definitely have done.

And Owen, Tosh and Ianto...they hadn't chosen to die. Torchwood had murdered them, like it loved to do, and Jack suspected that if he looked up Gwen in the archival records of South Wales, he would find her death certificate suspiciously vague as well.

Five hundred years and he couldn't put them out of his mind, even for a day.

Torchwood still survived, though now a bloated organisation that had become, essentially, a space-based version of Customs and Border Control. It rarely dealt with the killing of aliens, these days, and even when it did, it had its own minor army to handle it.

For obvious reasons, the British Government was keen to keep Torchwood happy.

Jack, however, both looked perfectly human, was wearing perfectly modern and human clothing, and carried incredibly convincing false papers declaring him to have been born on the North Mars Colony, which was British-owned and run.

He was, essentially, British.

He had sailed through Torchwood's controls without a signal alarm being raised – clearly, his records had been destroyed and his face consigned to the same void of memory as the faces of his dead team. Still, it hurt to walk past all the people who worked for the same organisation he had, and for them to have no idea of the deaths of his team in the interests of their country. It was like being a war veteran to a conflict consigned to only the memories of the very old.

_Very _old.

And here was London. It was unrecognisable now, the ancient city buried underneath technology and modernity. The underground was perhaps the only surviving piece of the London that Jack's team would have known. Canary Wharf – never rebuilt – would have been dwarfed and insignificant in this city.

But it was still London. It smelt of fast food. It was rife with pigeons. There were still gaping areas of green parkland for no apparent reason. The locals were rude and curt, and businessmen rushed through the streets and their lives in a world of their own. The yammer of wireless communication still bounced off glass walls. The streets still crawled with tour buses and Japanese tourists.

It was achingly familiar, and Jack took in a deep lungful of clammy air before finding a map and seeking out the New London University.

* * *

Georgina was a student of history and philosophy, and, as such, was quite easily one of the most distracted and fluffy people that Jack had ever met. Her enthusiasm for everything odd was big enough to rival the Doctor's, and she had absorbed Jack's stories of time travel and immortality like a child.

For the most part, she didn't believe him, but she really had to on the immortality front, or, at the very least, admit that he had a long lifespan. She had known him – through her parents (equally dippy people that had worked on the first space habitats) – since she was a little girl, and now she was a twenty-five-year-old student.

She had met him at the doors of the history department with a squeal and a hug that, respectively, threatened to perforate his eardrums and break his left arm, then had dragged him over to the science labs.

"You came just on the right day!" she told him happily, the smile on her face threatening to split it in half. "You're the perfect source – the university is funding this _huge _research project into reincarnation, you see, because this research centre in China is finding electronic records of people before they're born, and..."

Jack blinked at her in confusion. Reincarnation? That was silly religious superstition. It was laughed off completely by the time his colony was established, let alone by the time he would be born (oh, time travel was enough to make your brain ache) so he was either looking at a project doomed to failure, or a future cover up. And a fantastic one at that, because the New University of London did not fail at its research projects.

"How are you in on it?" he asked. "What about your paper?"

"The postgraduate who teaches my metaphysics tutorials is on the project," she said, almost dismissively. "And forget my paper! Who _cares_? Seriously, it's an amazing project and can you _imagine _the employment potential if I can say I worked on an N.U.L. project? Come _on_, Jack, you _know _you want to help!"

* * *

Georgina's parents had worked on the construction of the first human colony in space (okay, on the Moon, but close enough) and Jack had met them when the cargo ship he had been working on had decided to investigate this new feature on the rock.

He had been called in to translate, and had befriend Georgina's mother. Purely and simply because she reminded him of Gwen, with her big blue eyes and strict moral code. Although she was far more devoted to her then-boyfriend than Gwen had been to Rhys, Jack had still felt the pull of a woman who wasn't yet cynical about her world.

He had kept up communication with them, and when Georgina's father had been permanently posted to the Moon Colony, Jack had visited several times, the closest he could bring himself to Earth and humanity again. It helped that nobody he found on the Moon Colony physically looked like his team – all of them, for whatever reason, were blonde or redheaded.

Georgina had been born up there, and as a child had been fascinated by his adventure stories. He had even, as she grew older, told her the occasional, faltering story about his team, particularly the deaths of Owen, Tosh and Ianto in the line of duty.

Telling Georgina the stories had helped to ease the pain, so when she asked Jack to come to Earth, he could little refuse. But now, if they were going to be discussing in _realistic _terms times that had long passed, Jack wasn't so sure that he wanted to be here.

* * *

Physics labs had come a _long _way. In fact, the university laboratory that Jack was shown into resembled the research labs in Torchwood One, and those had been, at the time, state of the art. His history of this millennium was a little rusty, but he was pretty sure this was high tech, even for now.

"We're using the computers to gather electronic data," Georgina was saying as she shepherded him inside, "and running DNA comparison programs and facial recognition software on people with similar looks to find matches."

"You're seriously doing a scientific study into reincarnation?"

"Yes!" Georgina exclaimed. "The funding is pouring in, so it's a _big _project! Anyway, with such a history of electronic data and stored DNA samples from the past, we can do so much _more _than the old scientists could. We have almost six hundred years of electronic data to use, Jack!"

"I know."

"And we _will _use it!" Georgina carried on blithely.

"But," Jack said, "just because people reincarnate doesn't mean that they will look..."

"It's a _theory_, and if they don't, we just disproved a theory anyway! Come on, come here and meet Amy – she's leading the team on the facial recognition programming..."

She hauled him over to a far corner, where a woman with long hair and dressed in dark clothes under a thin lab coat was bent over a panel of screens, a pair of glasses in one hand.

"Amy, Amy, take your attention off them for a second," Georgina urged, pulling her around to face Jack. "Jack, meet Amy; Amy, this is my friend Jack..."

But Jack didn't hear the rest – frozen in shock, he didn't even reach to shake Amy's hand. Georgina's voice vanished and the world narrowed to himself and Amy, nothing and nobody else.

Because he was looking straight at a living and breathing Suzie Costello.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes: A surprisingly quick update. Thanks to everyone who reviewed!**

**Cut, Copy and Paste**

**Chapter Two**

Perhaps wisely, Jack kept his mouth shut.

But it was Suzie. He was certain of it. The same sharp eyes, the same secret smile, the same long-fingered hands, the same cloud of dark fluffy hair that had always made her look so disarming. The same _intelligence_, burning behind those irises, the same...

His memory couldn't be tricking him this badly, could it? It was _exactly _the same woman he remembered, right down to the way she pushed her hair out of her face from being bent over the computer. Hell, she even filled out the lab coat the same way, and Jack had ogled her backside enough in the past to know.

"So," he said, desperately trying not to let his shock show, "facial recognition, huh?"

She quirked an eyebrow at him – God, how _Suzie_ – and nodded: "I believe that's what Georgina said."

She then launched into a more detailed, more technical explanation of the programming. Like way back when, Jack didn't understand her language and zoned out a little, watching the way her fingers clacked over the flat keypads, the flash of a simple bracelet on her wrist, the sharp angles of her elbows creasing her lean arms.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder: Jack could barely see the veiled threat of genius under Suzie's face that he had always been wary of – yet always missed – in her before. Did this Suzie have the same upbringing? The same drive? The same needs? Would she – could she? – go astray like _his _Suzie.

Because they couldn't possibly be the same Suzie. She was dead and gone, and their cyrogenics had been imperfect. They hadn't taken the procedures to prevent rupturing of the blood vessels in the cold, or to protect the vital organs from ice damage. Their units weren't perfect. And anyway, vast parts of the morgue would have been destroyed in the explosion that destroyed the original Torchwood Cardiff. His Suzie's body was likely to be completely destroyed and rotten away forever.

This Suzie could not be his Suzie.

But she was still _Suzie_.

"Can you get into Torchwood personnel databases?" he asked suddenly, and Suzie...Amy...whoever! – gave him a funny look.

"Only the dead ones," she said slowly. "How would you...?"

"I used to work for them," Jack said, and hoped she wouldn't check.

She narrowed her eyes. "I _do _work for them, _Jack_, and I..."

"Oh, he's harmless," Georgina interrupted. "And Amy, seriously, Jack knows what he's doing."

"Okay..." Suzie/Amy still looked doubtful.

"Could you get the DNA records for those personnel? And..." Jack swallowed. "Could I have a sample of yours?"

Suzie/Amy blinked, her head swivelling round to stare at him incredulously, and Georgina squealed.

"You mean you think...?"

"I mean," he said slowly, "that...Amy...looks _exactly _like someone I...someone in the databases."

"Photographs?"

"Pictures," Jack amended. He wouldn't have thought that any photographs of Suzie Costello were still out there to be found – over the centuries, they would have fallen into the black hole of information that awaited data on the dead. "But we had DNA records, so..."

"A comparison," Suzie/Amy was already heading over to another machine, and ferreting for swabs in various jars. "If we can prove..."

Jack then asked Georgina to show him around the rest of the labs, too unsettled to be able to watch a woman he both knew and didn't working in a way that was so achingly familiar.

* * *

They were just sitting down to lunch, Georgina and Jack, in one of the university's many cheap canteens when Suzie/Amy caught up with them, brandishing a sheet of paper and looking somewhat flustered.

"Well," she said to Jack. "I suppose you and I must have met before."

She threw the paper down in front of him, but it meant little more to him than any of his Suzie's test results, or even Owen's medical files full of jargons and graphs.

"Susanne Costello and I are, apparently, the same person," she said.

She didn't seem pleased by the news, as he would have expected. He would have expected a researcher into reincarnation to be pleased that not only was it apparently true, but that she herself had a previous life. Wouldn't that justify the research and the time better than any other result, after all?

But Georgina had already squealed in excitement and yanked the scientist down to sit, babbling about the implications and whatnot, allowing Jack to watch Suzie/Amy and think.

If Suzie – however it had happened – was here, then who was to say that the rest of the team weren't here too? What if Tosh and Owen and Gwen and Ianto had _all_, somehow, been...what? Restored? Reborn? Whatever – _what if they were here?_

"Do me a favour," he said to Suzie/Amy, rooting for his wallet and drawing out a photograph. "Do you recognise any of the people in this photo?"

It was one of the team – ancient, colour faded, and crumpled – that had survived in the recesses of Jack's belongings for five hundred years. It was after Suzie's second death, but before those of Owen and Toshiko, and so it was the one that Jack had secreted with him for all these years, to keep their faces fresh in his mind.

She drew it to her face, examining the faces critically, before handing it back.

"No," she said.

But she had Suzie's face, and Jack had always known when Suzie was telling an outright lie.

So there was someone else.

* * *

One of these days, David decided, he was going to write a book about his job, make a million, and quit. Retire to some tiny island in the middle of the Pacific and grow lilies. If you could even grow lilies in the middle of the Pacific.

To be honest, though, his job was fairly boring. He was just a guardsman for the Torchwood Institute – nothing glamorous about that. Oh, sure, he could concoct a rumour mill from the things he'd seen that would scare little kids into comas, but they were just rumours. He guarded the entrance to London's medical facility, for God's sake: people came in all the time looking like they'd gone ten rounds with a Weevil and lost.

David was a fairly lowly employee and had only been there for two years. He'd seen lots of badly injured people, but aliens were, on the whole, capable of inflicting a fair bit of damage. Especially the big ones. David himself had never seen an alien in the First Institute, but he saw them in their tourist groups around London all the time, just like everyone else. They were weird, but they fairly invariably left people alone. Except Weevils, but they weren't tourists, they were pests. David was _glad _he wasn't a field operative. Imagine getting your throat ripped out by a Weevil.

The advantage of his job was, though, that as he stood there for eight hours a day, he invariably got to see Jonathon. Every single day, Jonathon had to come down to medical for samples – poisons, alien fluids, everything that Torchwood could research. It had to be taken, for whatever reason, by a qualified professional complete with armed escort.

David wished he could get promotion to armed escorts, just to talk to Jonathon more.

Today, though, Jonathon looked harried and didn't have his escort with him at all.

"What's going on?" David asked as he scrutinised the – as usual – perfect ID card.

"Rumours," Jonathon said. "Apparently there's been a problem with the Echo Project."

"Why?" David asked, hoping to keep Jonathon behind longer.

"Some university project," Jonathon grimaced. "Might result in a leak."

"What, that reincarnation thing?" David snorted. Everybody knew about that, and everybody knew that it wasn't important. "They'll just be thrilled they've figured out which religion is right, surely?"

"No," Jonathon said slowly, "because rumour has it that the Immortal is back. Is real. Whatever."

David gaped.

The Immortal was the stuff of legends, really. The same man had, according to perfectly reliable data, worked for Torchwood for well over a hundred years. He had been referred to sporadically in even older or more recent reports – and searches for him in other fields had found his name linked to the infamous Doctor.

But until now, lowly employees like Jonathon and David thought him just a great, cosmic joke on the part of a particularly expert hacker.

"Bet it's fun in Data Control right now, then," David joked, and Jonathon grimaced.

"I'll bet it is," he said dryly. "I'd better get a move on. We're so understaffed that I'm running paperwork duty at the moment, so five operatives decide to get chewed on by Weevils."

"Glad I'm not you," David said, hefting the gun higher. "See you round."

Jonathon waved over his shoulder as he walked off, and David sighed wistfully. Too bad the bloke was taken.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes: Might be a pause after this update, as I'm not happy with Four yet. It's being awkward.**

**Cut, Copy and Paste**

**Chapter Three**

The walk home was damp, but the rain wasn't strong enough to warrant an umbrella. It was only as Jonathon swiped his card to get into the block of flats that he remembered Paul had the week off and, subsequently, would be home.

"Shit," he said aloud in the lift, and got a funny look from the other occupant. He gave her a small smile as he got out at his floor, and tried to swipe the card for the flat as quietly as possible.

The door was yanked open, and he was met with Paul's shrewd dark eyes.

"I saw you," he said, hauling him inside and nodding at the window. "You're a bloody twat, do you know that? Do you _want _a relapse?"

Jonathon privately thought that Paul was a bit too overprotective about this. It had been six months since the pneumonia bout, after all. He was completely recovered, and a bit of drizzle wasn't going to cause another collapse. But then, that's what he got for dating a doctor.

Paul worked at the largest hospital in London, mostly in the A&E department, though he specialised in thoracic damage and diseases. Probably why he was so particularly het up about the pneumonia. It had been pretty nasty pneumonia, but it had only required four days in hospital. That wasn't too bad – Anita on Jonathon's floor at work had been hospitalised for three weeks when she got pneumonia.

"Dry your hair," Paul said, emerging from the bathroom and flinging a towel at Jonathon's head. It was warm from the heating system, and blissfully soft. "And get changed. I made food."

"Did you blow up the kitchen?"

"Nope," Paul said. "In fact, I even cleaned it."

"So you did blow up something."

"Well, I didn't know you're supposed to poke holes in potatoes before you microwave them."

Jonathon snickered. Paul was famously and unapologetically crap in the kitchen, apart from omelettes, Italian food, and hot drinks. His hot chocolates and coffees in particular were sinful. Jonathon was fairly sure that had they been invented in the ancient times, he would have been destined for the Christian Hell for enjoying it so much.

Not to mention enjoying other things that Paul was good at.

"Your carer called," Paul continued, plucking a sticky note off the videophone. "Apparently, you haven't called in ages so something is clearly wrong and it's my fault."

"Is she still going along that line of thinking?" Jonathon pulled a face.

Jonathon's carer thoroughly disliked Paul. He was rude, he was sarcastic, public displays of affection were foreign concepts to him, and the nearest thing he used to an endearment was a foreign bastardisation of Jonathon's given name. He was a partner, not a romantic, and Jonathon's carer disapproved as much as was feasibly possible.

"Yeah, guess so," Paul shrugged. "Oh, and you should really be finding a proper significant other because otherwise you'll find yourself too old to adopt children."

Jonathon grimaced at the very idea of children, and Paul snickered.

"Tom called to offer a shift exchange...two wrong numbers...and the usual bog-standard weather warning," Paul rolled his eyes. "Rolling electrical storms tomorrow, apparently."

"Oh good," Jonathon said. "If the power fails, I can stay at home. Mandatory personnel only if there's a shortout. Less chance of people getting killed by rampaging escaped alien prisoners."

"Lovely," Paul grimaced. "Why do you work there again?"

"At least I don't work in a minefield of disease, decay and death."

"Guess not," Paul said. "Go change. Shower, even. The food will reheat. It's takeout."

"Cordon bleu."

* * *

Jack had persuaded Georgina, over the following two days, to let him access the facial recognition programs and upload his photograph. He doubted, after the destruction of the Hub that had followed the 456 and their brief spate of terror, that the original data from his team survived, let alone photographs that would fit into the criteria for the program.

"We can check anyway," Georgina urged, and he grimaced.

"If I give you the dates, you check," he said. "I'll do it with this photograph. I have to know, Georgie. If they're..."

"I get it."

So here he was, in the underbelly of the physics department of the university, waiting eagerly as the computer ran through photographs of thousands of people. Volunteers for the survey, university personnel, families of those personnel, anyone the councils had had to perform criminal records checks on...thousands upon thousands.

In fact, most of the city that was between the ages of eighteen and seventy.

And one by one, matches flickered to life on the screen.

Three of the matches were, to human eyes, clearly wrong, and Jack deleted them impatiently, but bit by bit, definite matches were found.

Jack's eyes were blurring before he even examined the records. The photographs didn't come with records that he could access – he couldn't find their names or locations or even if they were still living or simply _had _lived more recently than he knew of.

But they had, in any case, existed again.

It found a photograph of Tosh first. Her petite face was a mirror image of the shy smile in Jack's photograph. Her hair was shorter, professionally cut, and her glasses completely absent.

Gwen followed Tosh – an easy recognition to perform with the flaw of her teeth, showing in both Jack's picture and the photo on the database. She, too, had shorter hair, and her smile was even wider, brilliant and innocent and pretty.

Ianto and Owen followed in rapid succession, and were both perfect reflections of the sombre faces in the photo. They hadn't changed a bit, from their hair to the determined set of Owen's jaw and the blank expression on Ianto's face.

They were all here somewhere, all in the city, or had been. The whole team – and maybe not just them. Maybe the _old_ team too, maybe Martha and Donna and maybe even Rose, because she would have died by now no matter where she was. Maybe Jack could have them all back, get that life back again, and be _happy _again – genuinely happy for the first time since the turn of the twenty-first century and Alex's breakdown.

It was all right here.

They were within reach.

Ignoring Georgina, Jack unashamedly let himself cry for what he'd lost and what he could possibly, finally gain again.

And then alarms started screaming.

* * *

The beeping of the videophone recording an automated message jerked Paul out of a light doze. Lifting his head to peer at the screen in the corner of the studio apartment, he saw the flashing Torchwood symbol and thought he'd better answer it.

Most of the time, automated messages were useless bits of information warning about potential problems that never happened. But like health risk warnings, it was daft to ignore the ones sent by institutions like Torchwood.

Jonathon was dead to the world, so Paul gingerly slipped out from under him and padded naked to the videophone. It was a text message, so he didn't bother to retrieve his dressing gown before opening it.

_Warning to all Torchwood personnel: photographic identities of personnel and their families have been accessed by an outside and potentially hostile force. Until the origins and purposes of these attacks have been determined, we warn all Torchwood personnel to remain vigilant and report any suspicious attention or activity around them or their families. Any persons listed in our systems as spouses, long-term partners, next of kin, carers or children (biological and societal) may have been viewed._

It was a fairly generic warning, in Paul's opinion. Accessing entire files was a problem, but accessing photos wasn't. And any, Torchwood conducted research with outside companies, so sometimes there was bound to be a minor data leak.

"Paul?"

He flicked the screen off and returned to the bed. It was ludicrously warm, and Jonathon curled around him again contentedly, even as he was beginning to wake up.

"Go back to sleep," Paul commanded, pressing Jonathon's head down to rest on his shoulder, and brushing a kiss into his hair. Nobody could see the sentiment here anyway. "It wasn't anything important."

"Sure?" the voice was drowsy.

"Yep," Paul said. "Go to bloody sleep already."

He was rewarded with a tiny snicker and the slow, languid ease into relaxed sleep that he could feel through Jonathon's skin and muscles. He lay in the dark, listening to fluid-clear breathing carefully, and felt surprisingly content.

Which, for Paul, meant things were shortly going to go wrong.

* * *

"His name is Captain Jack Harkness," she said, "and he threatens the secrecy of the Echo Project."

Her team listened carefully. They were all trained to the highest degree and would be more than capable of capturing Harkness, despite what the Immortal's file said.

"He is Immortal, theoretically," she continued. "But we're not completely interested in his survival, merely that he stops looking into this reincarnation project. Feel free to shoot or disable him, but do not harm any civilians. The last thing we need is a government outcry. Your files all have photos and location details – but _make sure _it is Harkness. No mistaken identities. Anybody who messes up will be in _deep _shit. You all know what that means."

They did. Deep shit meant they would get to see the Commander. The Commander was in charge of the whole of Torchwood in its current incarnation – and was famously intolerant of errors. People had gone to see the Commander before and simply not come back.

"So?" she queried, peering around at them. "Go!"


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes: Thanks to all of you who reviewed! In other news, I am in a very happy place. I hope to have the first draft of my first novel finished by Christmas. Watch these spaces, people!**

**Cut, Copy and Paste**

**Chapter Four**

Jack reacted instinctively.

He ran.

The moment the alarms went off, the lights went out, and the computer screen went blank, those precious faces vanishing. But Jack ignored that, leaping from his seat and barreling out of the lab, leaving Georgina in his wake. She would be safe – he would not.

It was almost an instinctive reaction. Jack knew that this period of history was furtive and suspicious – he knew it was both an excellent and a terrible time to be alive. He knew plenty about this world, but not _why _such situations were in effect.

And so he ran. As an immortal man, he would always be in danger, from humans or aliens. Some aliens would know him; some humans, even, if the Doctor had been messing too much. Five hundred years away from Earth hadn't changed that.

He heard the sounds of approaching sirens as he ran down the shining corridors, and changed tack, heading for the roof. As the sirens came closer, he faintly recognised the echoing, pitched wail that would become a famous noise in the future, and he felt sick.

It couldn't be them. It just _couldn't be_.

He sprinted up the stairs, hoping that his observations the other day about the building hadn't been wrong. It was four storeys high, and surrounded on three sides by main roads. They would be here soon, and if it really was them, then...

He burst out onto the roof, and heard breaking glass from below. Someone was screaming, faintly, and he realised that whether he was wrong or not...if it still was Torchwood, then something had gone wrong. Again. Who ran this Torchwood? Was it another like Yvonne Hartman – another more interested in brutal protection and offensiveness than cooperation?

Or was it not even Torchwood any more?

Either way, they could not find Jack.

He crouched low and sprinted across the roof, keen not to be spotted by any intrepid foot-soldier on the ground. He headed for the north wall, peering cautiously over the edge of the low wall into the dark alley below.

He positioned himself carefully, heard a short burst of startled gunfire, and jumped.

As he drew level with it, he caught the lid of the open dumpster and pulled it shut behind him – and although the impact killed him, it hid him from view.

* * *

Amy closed the lid of the dumpser again and pocketed the photograph that she had stolen from the man's – Jack's – wallet. Turning on her heel sharply, she strode back into the building, leaving her lab coat on its hook and shrugging on her usual jacket. The raid had interrupted an entire day's work, and they hadn't even been intelligent enough to hide his corpse properly.

But it had also put her back up. Torchwood wasn't particularly known for killing people. Aliens, maybe, but not people. The government didn't stand for that, though it didn't much care about its alien immigrant population. So was Jack, then, an alien?

He had to be something. The photograph now secured in her jeans told a story that Amy didn't like at all. Two of the people – some woman, and Jack himself – were strangers to her, but the other faces were all familiar. She could understand a doctored photograph being able to contain two of them, but she was _certain _that Jonathon had never met Mrs Saunders. Why would he?

So it was no surprise to Amy that Torchwood had picked up on Jack. But at the end of the day, she didn't really care why they had. Jack was not going to get in the way – nothing did, and some strange non-human life form was no exception. He would be a nice distraction and little else.

After all, if Torchwood were going to chase Jack like this, then they wouldn't have all that much time and manpower to chase Amy, now were they? And eventually, Amy knew, a chase would begin.

* * *

Jonathon was, by nature, a curious man. He'd always been that way. Even as a child, his drive to find out everything possible about the world around him had kept him busy when other kids would have been bored stiff in the current education system.

And Torchwood raids were _rare_.

David downstairs had told him about it – God only knew how much information Jonathon gleaned from David's chatter – and Jonathon had, quite naturally, gone digging. Only Jonathon's digging was a mile away from Jack's digging, because Jonathon a) knew the current systems, b) had helped to design the current systems, and c) had perfect clearance to go archive-hunting without setting off any automated warnings at all.

And Jonathon's digging had, for the first time, frightened him.

There was nothing really off about the man. They all knew the stories of the immortal man – Jonathon didn't believe them, personally, but he had to admit that Harkness at least had to be an alien with a long lifespan. And his files didn't contradict that – he'd worked for Torchwood on and off for roughly two hundred years, had completely vanished for five hundred bar some unconfirmed reports of him on various human space colonies and stations, and had, apparently, now decided to come back.

But what frightened Jonathon was the report of Harkness's apparent leadership in the first version of Torchwood: Wales. Cardiff alone, then, but essentially the same post, and Harkness had, for a short time, led a team of between three and six at various points.

And there were reports on that team, dug up from various sources around the country. By far the most reported were two that had worked for Torchwood here in London – Jones and Costello. Followed shortly by a Japanese technology expert called Sato. The other two – Cooper and Harper – had faded into relative obscurity, bar two surviving team photographs.

And Jonathon recognised every single person in the photographs.

He swallowed uneasily, checking the dates and sources of the data in the system again and again, until his head hurt with the knowledge that this was not a joke. Harkness somehow – _how_?! – had a connection to him. And not just him, but his whole _life_.

Jonathon sprang into action, fumbling in his desk for a ranged estranged communicator. Technically called RECs, most people referred to them as ranger-strangers – their cute little trick was that, based on a photograph or DNA input of the intended recipient, they could find them – whether the sender knew them or not.

And if the immortal was around, Jonathon could send him a message.

He snapped an enlarged photograph of Harkness from the system with the REC, loaded his brief and rather curt message, and send the tiny ball of electronic spinning off to find Harkness.

He then eyed the team photographs again dubiously, and wondered what, exactly, he was supposed to tell Paul.

* * *

"I _don't _know him!" Georgina said, for the five hundredth time. The officer said nothing, his steely grey eyes boring into hers. "I don't know anything about him before that! He can't be immortal, that's stupid!"

"Don't lie to me," the man reiterated. "We can do this all night. I know you know Harkness, and I know you know what he is. What I want to know is what _he _knows."

"You'll have to ask him," said Georgina flatly. "I don't know _any _of that. He's just a family friend, nothing else!"

"So do you know him or not?" the man asked.

"Not like you're saying! I don't know _details_!" she said desperately. "He hasn't done anything wrong, has he?"

"You tell me."

Georgina was ready to cry. This had been going on for hours, and she didn't know what they were getting at. They'd had permission to use the database! Torchwood had practically donated it! How would they know if Jack _had _looked – anyone could have been using that computer! She was tired and confused and _scared _– Torchwood _surely _didn't have the right to interrogate people like this?

"I want to call my lawyer," she fell back on finally, and the man snorted.

"Extra-terrestrials," he said, "don't have legal representation within the British Isles."

He turned a page of the file on the desk between them and said: "So, tell me. Who else does Harkness know in London?"


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes: Thanks to all of you who reviewed! I'm sorry for the delay, but I gave NaNoWriMo a shot. I've since given up at about 30,000 words, so here we are again.**

**Cut, Copy and Paste**

**Chapter Five**

Parenting had been left behind by the 2400s. Natural parenting was a dead art – mostly because of how seriously it damaged the children when it went wrong. There were countless, countless examples of children born into families with poor parenting skills, who had subsequently been damaged and grown up (if they had at all) to be murderers, rapists, amoral idiots, cheats, crooks, thieves and politicians.

The new system was very functional, and resulted in well-fed, well-balanced, well-educated children who were tolerant of differences and kinder as a whole to their fellow man.

Instead of parents, the new system used carers. Every baby, upon birth, was put into the nearest care home to be looked after by nurses and 'temporary carers' until they were taken in by a carer, or a couple of carers. They would remain with this new family, and their new brothers and sisters, permanently.

At the same time, because all babies were removed into the system, whether their biological parents were fit or not, all people who wanted to have children had to turn to the caring system. It was a criminal offence to hide your baby from them – it would be removed, and your parenting ability permanently marked as 'highly negative' in government files.

For the first six months of a new child's life in a family, there would be weekly inspections and visits, and any seriously unhappy children were taken back into the system.

But that had its own problems. Removing unhappy babies meant that there was a problem, and it upset the other children often. Children formed attachments quickly, and siblings were usually very, very close.

Laura, although thirty-one, still saw her favourite brother every single Saturday, without exception, and they weren't blood related in the slightest. And Laura, though she had no contact with any blood relatives at all, was a keen advocate of the system and had done her best to keep it running from her powerful position. And she had a _lot_ of political clout these days.

Laura was not unusual in her estrangement from her biological family. There was no tilt whatsoever on siblings being biologically related. It was neither encouraged nor discouraged – except in the cases of twins, who were to be kept together if possible. Like most carers, Laura's had taken many children from different biological backgrounds and merely kept a casual note on who was related to whom in genetic terms.

Which reminded her.

She paused, saved the report she had been in the middle of reading, and activated her videoscreen to its voice only setting. Dialling, she waited for the answering machine – knowing they would be out – and said: "Jonathon, it's Laura. Remember to call Mum tomorrow, won't you? She's getting twitchy about what you're up to, and you know how she gets these days. See you Saturday."

She hung up and scribbled herself the same note. Their mother was old now, and beginning to get fretful about her children as if they hadn't been grown up and looking after themselves for the last ten to fifteen years.

Laura's family had never been large. Their carer (who insisted on the old fashioned 'Mum' as opposed to a first name like most carers used) had only taken five babies in her entire life, and Jonathon and Laura had been the last of them. Jonathon was three years younger than Laura, and had come to them as a newborn, still tiny and completely helpless.

"It'll do you good to have a baby brother," Mum had said, showing Laura the new baby. "His carrier didn't name him, so I've called him Jonathon. He'll look up to you, you know, and you'll have to help guide him. Carers can only do so much."

"Really?" Laura – then only four – had found that a funny concept, and Mum had nodded seriously.

"Siblings are very important," she'd said. "Don't ever forget how important they are."

Laura hadn't. She and Jonathon had been very close, to the point of almost excluding their older siblings. Irene and Jade had both never shown much interest in them – being twins, they had no need for other siblings – and Robert had eventually given up trying to prise the two of them apart. Laura and Jonathon had been thick as thieves for their entire childhoods – and their adult lives had even brought them in vaguely the same direction.

Laura remembered her history lessons and scoffed. How could their ancestors have abandoned their offspring so callously?

She turned back to the report on her screen and sighed. This, however, was not a perfect system. Sometimes, this job was all politics.

* * *

Ms. Maton eyed the young scientist in front of her, wondering exactly what ticked behind those cool eyes. She could read people well, and this young woman with the curly dark hair was definitely slightly menacing.

"What's this about?" Ms. Maton asked, and the scientist jerked her arm free of the security guard, handing over an archaic photograph of the kind that Ms. Maton hadn't seen since museum trips with the school as a child. In pull-up socks. That's how long she hadn't seen one of these.

She flipped it over and eyed the faces with disinterest. Two familiar, the others not.

"What about it?" she asked flatly.

"I took it from the Immortal," the woman – Amy Jackson, something like that – said. "He avoided your security people, but he'll be back. He seems the curious type."

"We _know _he's the curious type, Miss Jackson, get to the point," Ms. Maton said. "I do have other things to do, you know."

"I'm saying you have a serious security leak on your hands," Miss Jackson – if that even was her surname – replied. "He seemed startled by the implications of myself. I'm in there. That suggests that the future – his future – doesn't contain Project Echo."

"Project Echo," Ms. Maton replied, "is functioning perfectly and has been doing so for fifty years. What makes you think that...?"

"He's from the future. You know the files."

"I do," Ms. Maton replied. "Are you suggesting that Project Echo will fail."

"Or it should never have existed."

"Miss Jackson," Ms. Maton said. "Torchwood is committed to protecting the here and now. Project Echo itself is not of our concern, and certainly none of yours. Our job is simply to handle extra-terrestrials, not to guide the government in their moral and religious duties."

"Those duties affect the future."

"That isn't our concern," Ms. Maton said. "The future can look after itself. If the Immortal has a problem with Project Echo, then we shall persuade him to keep quiet about it. And the Immortal is only our concern because he is, for all intents and purposes, an alien. You are dismissed."

She spoke again, though, before Miss Jackson reached the door.

"I suggest that you cease your reincarnation project in terms of genetics. Otherwise we have a lot of very angry biologists – and then moralists – on our hands, asking how a species with such a small gene pool ever peaked at seven billion people."

* * *

Jack hauled himself out of the dumpster in the dark and brushed himself off as best he could. God, no matter how much the human race advanced, their trash smelled the same and always would.

He fumbled in his pocket and cursed when he realised that the photograph was gone. The prickle of pain that bloomed in his chest was unexpected, and he realised that staying here, he would not even begin to process the loss of his team and his friends.

He turned towards the mouth of the alley, the tears threatening, and pushed them back when he saw the approaching light, blinking lazily and drifting along like a tiny, tiny ghost.

A ranger-stranger.

And Jack Harkness was never one to pass up a conversation.


End file.
